


In the Midst of This Wind

by echofox



Category: Red Dead Redemption (Video Games)
Genre: Eventual Smut, F/M, Resolved Sexual Tension, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-02-26
Updated: 2020-02-26
Packaged: 2021-02-28 04:09:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,604
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22907551
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/echofox/pseuds/echofox
Summary: Arthur Morgan learned long ago to trust his head over his fool heart, and he swore he'd never fall again. But when a new addition to the Van der Linde gang arrives, he finds it difficult to think clearly. This woman makes him nervous and irrational and stupid and silly, but--worst of all--she makes him hope.(AU fic, no TB. Haven't yet decided which story events will be included, but the story starts while the gang is camping at Horseshoe Overlook.)
Relationships: Arthur Morgan/Original Female Character(s)
Kudos: 8





	1. Kat

Kat looked on in amusement as the very handsome--and currently very annoyed--outlaw stormed across the otherwise quiet, torch-lit camp to have his say.

“Dutch!” he called sharply. “Dutch, I will not have it! Do you hear me? It ain’t proper!”

Dutch looked up from the book he was reading by candlelight outside his tent. Arthur stood, hands on his hips, clearly ready for a fight of some kind, but the other man only looked at him blandly as he removed a pipe from his pocket.

“Arthur,” he said slowly, packing the pipe with tobacco from the other side of his vest. “Pray tell, son, what are you on about?”

“Katarina. You told her to go and find work at the Saints Hotel.”

“I did.”

Arthur huffed out an angry breath. “Well it ain’t right. She’s too young, and too new to this life, and she—well, she—it just ain’t right, Dutch!”

Dutch’s mouth turned up at the corners slightly, but he made a valiant effort to hide his mirth by lighting up his pipe and taking a long puff. “You do realize that most of our women have worked there at some point or another? And that everyone here has to earn their keep in some way?”

“There are plenty of other ways to help out,” he shot back.

“Such as?”

“She’s been doing a fine job with the washing.”

Kat rolled her eyes.

If she’d wanted to be a laundress for the rest of her life, she’d have stayed in one of the towns she’d stopped at on the way to Valentine. She could have remained in

New York, maybe—albeit under a different name and in a different neighborhood. But she’d never wanted to put down roots like that; it just wasn’t her.

This was the main reason she’d left her father and brother back east—well, it was one of two main reasons, anyway—and she couldn’t go back. She wouldn’t. She may have been poor now, and living rough, but at least she was free.

And while bathing lonely old men’s privates for ten cents per at the local hotel wasn’t exactly a dream situation, it was only a temporary necessity; she had to contribute to the camp’s coffers somehow. All the other women had a way to make money. Mary Beth and Tilly did a lot of pickpocketing in town, Sadie went out robbing with the men, and even Grimshaw got in a con or two every once in a while.

So when Karen invited Kat to come work with her at the hotel for a spell, she’d figured this was her in. If she wanted to stick around with the Van der Linde gang for much longer, she’d need to find a way to help out financially…and Kat had no experience stealing, scamming, or shooting. While she also hadn’t any experience in handling men’s private parts, Karen had told her it was easy to learn, “just like churning butter.” Thus, the baths it had to be.

(Kat had never had occasion to learn butter-churning, either, but she didn’t think it timely or prudent to mention that to Karen as yet.)

She should never have told Arthur about this new job, but she couldn’t help herself. He’d been in a rare good mood, and for once he’d not been holding her at arms length. They’d all come back from some stage robbery or other, and the score had been considerable, so everyone had partaken in a glass of fine whiskey with dinner and then some of the dear little fruit cakes that Mrs. Grimshaw had made for dessert. It’d all been so jolly and fun as they sat around the campfire, singing old sailor’s tunes as Javier accompanied them on his guitar.

The crowd dwindled until only a small group was left. Javier plucked his strings pensively, lost in his own musical world. Karen and Sean were loud in their ridiculous flirtation, so boisterous and comical that no one seemed to pay attention when Kat shuffled herself from one log to another in order to sit next to Arthur. He was drunk—no two ways about it—but unlike her father, the drink didn’t harden him or make him mean. Indeed, it was the opposite; he simply seemed looser, more relaxed, his long, muscled arms resting comfortably on his knees as he stared into the fire. When she sat down beside him he turned to look her over, and his eyes were soft and yielding, not guarded like usual. They got to chatting about things like the weather, and Pearson’s terrible cooking. Just little things, but it’d been the most words he’d directed at Kat since the night the gang had rescued her, and she relished every one.

…Then she’d made the mistake of mentioning her new career, and off he went to give Dutch a piece of his mind.

Finally, the other revelers took notice. Javier stopped playing, and Karen craned her neck from her spot on Sean’s lap to see what the ruckus was about. Even Uncle lifted his head off the grassy spot where he’d passed out earlier.

“Arthur, my boy,” Dutch was saying, his hand on the other man’s shoulder. “It’s the oldest profession in the world. And really, it’s not even so bad as all that, it’s just the baths.”

Arthur shut his eyes tight, sucking in a big lungful of air through his nose. “Just the baths?” he said in a low, dangerous voice that only grew louder the more he spoke. “Just the baths? Dutch, you and I both know the kind of men frequent those places, what kind of depraved, lecherous—“

“Oy, Art-er,” called Sean. “Ya best watch out how yer talkin’ about yer fellow gang members!”

Karen giggled into his shoulder. “I ain’t seen him this worked up since that Mary Linton’s last letter.”

“—Sons of bitches,” continued Arthur. “She’s just a young girl who barely knows anything about the world yet. How could she possibly know what these men are really looking for from her? And what if one of them corners her? Huh? Now, I cannot in good conscience allow—“

“Allow?” This time it was Kat who suddenly rose from her seat and stalked over to Dutch’s tent.

She heard Sean let out a low whistle behind her. “Aaand another county is heard from. Look at ‘er go!”

“Allow?” she said again when she reached her destination. Kat stood as tall as she could, so as to convey the most menace possible. He was still a head taller than her. “What do you mean, you can’t ‘allow’ it?”

Dutch no longer made any effort to hide his amusement. “Why, hello, Katarina! My boy Arthur here seems to think you’d make a terrible whore.”

She tilted her head to glare at Arthur.

“Now, that is not what I said.” He grimaced, holding up his hands as if realizing he’d been put on the back foot. “I simply said you weren’t old enough to know--“

“I’m twenty-three years old! That’s older than Karen and Abigail were when they started. Why, even Mary Beth has done it a time or two, and she’s younger than I am now! How difficult could it possibly be?”

At a loss for words, he looked to Dutch for help, but the older man shook his head. “Oh no, Morgan. You stepped in this one pretty good; it’s on you to dig yourself out.”

Kat sighed. “What would you have me do, Arthur? I don’t know how to pick pockets and I’ve never shot a gun…I can barely even ride a horse, for God’s sake.” She frowned. “I need to be useful somehow, and I can’t just hang around camp laundering shirts forever like a dutiful wife to twenty-odd men.”

“Like I said, you do a mighty fine job wash—“

“I don’t want to wash any more shirts!” she screamed in exasperation.

His brow lowered as he stepped closer to her, looking down like an angry god. “Well you’re sure as hell not going to be no prostitute neither! Not if I have a say!”

“YOU DON’T!”

Finally Dutch ceased his smirking and moved to defuse the situation. “Alright now, the pair of you have already woken Uncle out of a dead, drunk sleep, so I think this has gone far enough. What’s say we figure something out here?”

Neither Arthur nor Kat turned to look at Dutch, but both of them shrugged as if to say, “Go on.”

“Well now,” said Dutch. “We’re getting low on animal fat for munitions, and I know Pearson can use some extra meat and pelts, too. I need a couple of people to do some hunting—specifically for boars but it’d be nice to have some venison for stew. I was fixing to send Charles, but Hosea got a lead on a job this afternoon and I’ll need them both for a scout.”

She turned to look at Dutch, wrinkling her nose in confusion. “But I don’t know how to hunt, either.”

Arthur’s shoulders relaxed a little. “I could probably teach you some things,” he offered softly, almost shyly.

Before she could respond, Dutch clapped them both on the back. “Then it’s settled! You’ll leave tomorrow morning at first light.” He walked back to his reading chair without a second glance.

“Katarina,” Arthur began, his right hand moving to massage the back of his neck. The torch lights were too dim to know for sure, but Kat thought he might be blushing. “What I said earlier about you not knowing—well, that is, about you being—“

“Terrible at whoring?” she supplied brightly.

He squirmed a little. “Now, you see, again, that is a patent misrepresentation of what I said. What I was saying was—I mean, you—that is to say—“ He paused, then stared into her eyes, a serious and grave look on his face. It was clear to Kat that whatever Arthur was about to say, he believed it to his core.

“Miss Katarina, I think you’d make a very fine whore indeed.”

She gaped openly at him. And as several loud guffaws erupted from the campfire area, it seemed to dawn on Arthur what had just come out of his mouth. He stood stock still, like an opossum playing dead.

She blinked once, and hard. “Alright, then. I think I’ll turn in now.”

And as she turned her back on him to walk, stunned, to her bedroll, Kat heard Arthur mutter a single, frustrated word.

“Shit.”


	2. Arthur

Goddamnit, he’d done it again.

He’d made a fool of himself over some woman, and this one wasn’t even his. Had never been his. No matter how fervently his pathetic little heart felt to the contrary.

His efforts to remain distant had been going so well. He never sought her out to speak to her, never laughed at her silly little asides—though secretly, he was endlessly amused—and he certainly never let her catch him staring. He did stare, though.

Oh, how he stared.

Arthur watched Katarina with the focus of a panther stalking an unsuspecting doe. At first it had been merely admiring, maybe even—if he were being honest with himself—a hopeful kind of admiring. But by now the admiration had grown into something darker and more covetous. An urge to protect, to claim, to mark for all to see. _Mine_ , said that deepest, most savage part of him. _Mine._

But that piece of Arthur was also the reason Mary could never love him enough to stay with him. It was the reason Eliza and Isaac were murdered. He’d left them there alone because his wretched, outlaw soul had called him to the road, the next score, the faraway horizon. When he came back to find those two identical headstones, he was destroyed. He swore right then and there that he’d never make anyone else pay the price for his darkness.

He didn’t see people as being only good or only bad. There were many gray areas in life—this, he was old enough to understand by now. But deep down Arthur also knew that he was mostly bad. The only shred of goodness he’d had in him had been locked up tight after Isaac, or perhaps even laid to rest forever, like so many of the folks he’d killed along the way.

So it was, for many years. He’d been content…mostly. That is to say, he’d _survived_ , and that had been enough, hadn’t it?

Until her, he thought it had been.

They’d found Katarina in an O’Driscoll camp. It had been a long afternoon’s hunt in the Heartlands with Charles, and Arthur had nothing to show for it. His timing with the bow had been off, or the pronghorn had been too wily, or maybe it was just one of those days. Charles had got himself a nice buck and a few rabbits, but he didn’t boast on them. He seemed to sense Arthur’s black mood, and kept quiet until they came upon the rival gang encampment alongside Dewberry Creek.

Arthur crept up behind a man he was sure he’d seen harassing Tilly in town a few days before. He sliced the O’Driscoll’s throat cleanly, and Charles took care of his friend. The other two in the camp were easily dispatched with his revolver. Not exactly pronghorn, but animals all the same.

Charles went on back to camp, allowing Arthur to loot his spoils in peace. He’d been prying open an ammo box when he heard the little whimper. He hadn’t noticed her before, so focused was he on bleeding his enemy. The girl was gagged and tied to a tree, her strawberry-blonde hair messed into a rat’s nest. Her dress, a blue gown that had probably once been fancy and fine, was now tattered and full of caked mud. The front of the bodice had been torn a bit, and briefly Arthur wished that he’d tortured those men before he killed the lot of them.

Rushing to her and pulling the handkerchief from her mouth, he stroked her hair away from her tear-stained face to assess the situation. She was young, maybe not even twenty. Her eyes widened in fear as he touched her.

“Don’t be scared,” he murmured softly, gentling his voice like he would when speaking to a wild horse. “It’s alright. Everything’s alright now.”

The girl’s lower lip trembled, but she offered no response. Arthur moved to untie her wrists, rubbing his thumb briefly over the red welts that the coarse rope left in its wake. This poor girl. What had they done to her?

He remembered her dress, and quickly shrugged off his coat to cover her gaping decolletage. There must have been pity in his expression, because she drew back a little and raised her chin at him. She was proud, it seemed. She didn’t want him to feel sorry for her. Arthur knew that feeling intimately, so he backed away slowly and rose to his feet, giving her a bit of space.

She pulled his coat around her and buttoned it up the front, looking altogether ridiculous but somehow regal, too. “Thank you,” she said primly. “You may take me back to Valentine, if you please.”

Lifting her to sit side-saddle and then climbing up to sit behind her, he wrapped an arm around her body to hold her to him as they rode. The girl was bony, like she’d been missing a lot of meals, and he wondered for the first time where she’d come from.

He cleared his throat. “Miss, I don’t mean to pry, but—“

“They didn’t touch me,” she says shortly, gazing out toward the sun setting over the plains. “That is to say, they did, but not in the way you’re thinking.”

“I wasn’t thinking any—“

Her sudden, angry glance cut him off. “They said they were saving me as a gift for someone. Cone or Cole or something.” Shaking her head, she turned back around. “Men and their idiotic machinations.”

“Colm. Their leader’s name is Colm,” he muttered. It was all Arthur could do not to ride straight to Hanging Dog and slaughter the lot of them. Fucking O’Driscolls. Never had he wanted to exterminate such a large group of people all at once. And in a horrible, grotesque way. With dynamite or some such…Yes, dynamite would do the trick nicely.

She interrupted his murderous thoughts with a small sigh. “I don’t suppose you know of a place I could stay this evening? Those men, they took everything I had.” The girl sounded so world-weary, he wondered if he’d been wildly wrong about her age. “I don’t have money,” she continued, finally looking back at him with earnest gray eyes. “But I can work. I’ll do whatever needs doing.”

Arthur nodded thoughtfully, as though he were considering. In truth, he must have decided to take her back to camp the second he first saw her. “Miss, may I have your name?”

“Katarina,” she said warily.

He couldn’t help but smile a little. “Well, Miss Katarina, my name is Arthur, and I think I’ve got just the place for you.”

She gave a small, grateful nod, then relaxed into him, and they rode in companionable silence back to Horseshoe Overlook. The gang welcomed her cautiously. They treated her as Arthur had earlier, like a wild horse ready to run at the smallest of movements. The women helped her clean up a bit, and Mary Beth gave her a dress to wear. He offered up his cot for her to sleep on if she wished; he’d spent many a night on his bedroll beneath the stars, and he assured her it weren’t no trouble.

It wasn’t until he briefly ducked in the tent later on to grab his shaving kit that it happened. Katarina had left a small candle burning by the side of the bed, as though she’d retained a childhood fear of the dark. (He couldn’t blame her really, after what she’d just been through.)

For the first time, he allowed his eyes free reign of her. Unfettered and greedy, they traveled over her delicate face with its little upturned nose and long eyelashes, then her hands, folded palm to palm under her cheek, and finally down the long line of her neck, which of course had him imagining that vast expanse of creamy, white skin that had been revealed by her torn dress earlier. Goddamn, she was perfect.

But in the same instant he understood the fact that she was—and he felt this right down to his bones—the most beautiful woman he’d ever laid eyes on, he also understood that she could never, ever be his. He was too old, too ugly, too stupid. All this, but an even greater obstacle between them was one simple truth: Arthur Morgan was not a good man. And he knew without a doubt that she needed— _deserved_ —not just a good man, but a great one.

That had been four months ago, and apparently he still hadn’t learned a damn thing.

“Shit,” he said aloud again.

She’d long since disappeared into the tent she shared with Tilly and Mary Beth, and he realized he’d been standing there for a good ten minutes, watching after her like a simpleton. Javier was back to his guitar and Karen and Sean were back to…whatever it is that Karen and Sean did together. (He really didn’t want to know.)

Arthur trudged toward his tent, silently cursing all the bourbon he’d downed this evening. Liquor made a fool of every man at some point, and tonight it had done its foul work on him, alright. Imagine! He’d pinned his giant, silly heart on his sleeve for the whole camp to see. Just like a lovesick schoolboy. And for what? She’d never love him back, she’d never—

“Oh, Arthur?” called Karen from behind him. “Forgive my eavesdroppin’, but did I hear you disparaging my profession earlier?”

He turned, narrowing his eyes as he shot her a fake smile. “Say, Karen, I don’t ever recall you being quite so eager to shepherd newcomers into the fold. Ain’t you always telling anybody who’ll listen that all the pretty, young things cut into your personal profit share?”

The glint of mischief in her grin told him his suspicions were correct. Always stirring shit, that one.

“I was just tryin’ to be a help! Besides, it all worked out fine, didn’t it? Now y’all can go _hunting_ together. Won’t that be _fun_?”

“The way you say ‘hunting’ sounds an awful lot like a euphemism.”

“Well now, Arthur, you know I don’t cotton to those big words of yours. I can’t imagine what you mean by that!”

He made a dismissive grunt and turned back toward his tent.

“Ya know, Morgan,” came Sean’s annoying brogue next. “Might do ya a bit of good to have a nice roll in it. Ye sure are grumpy these days…Though I guess ye’ve always been grumpy, now that I tink about it.”

“Sean,” Arthur called out behind him as he walked into his tent. “When I want your opinion, I’ll—oh right, I forgot: I’ll never want your opinion on anything. Now the two of you, kindly take your act to the nearest wagon bed or outhouse. Hell, go find a nice bush to copulate in. The rest of us need some shut-eye.”

Of course, the lone sound he heard in his dreams all night was those two fools laughing after him like a pair of prize donkeys.


End file.
